Pete Souza

Pete Souza

President Obama has lost The Washington Post’s editorial board with his disastrous foreign policy.

In a hard-hitting editorial today, the Post’s editors declared Obama’s outlook a “fantasy” and said that “For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality.”

They described Obama’s fantasy world:

It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past.

This is exactly what Heritage’s James Carafano and Kim Holmes warned about early in the Obama presidency.

“The tenets of the Obama Doctrine… do not reflect history or the threats we face,” said Carafano, the E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Holmes, author of Liberty’s Best Hope: American Leadership for the 21st Century. “They will serve to undermine America’s strengths and make it more difficult for friends and allies to figure out where we stand or how we might act in critical times.”

Carafano and Holmes predicted in 2010: “The Obama Doctrine, by seeking to remake America to please others, will fail because, in the end, no one will like the instability, vulnerability, and economic stagnation that follow from a weaker America.”

Now it seems the Post agrees, if reluctantly. The editors wrote:

Military strength, trustworthiness as an ally, staying power in difficult corners of the world such as Afghanistan — these still matter, much as we might wish they did not. While the United States has been retrenching, the tide of democracy in the world, which once seemed inexorable, has been receding. In the long run, that’s harmful to U.S. national security, too.

More people admit there is a problem with Obama’s foreign policy—but will the Administration own up to it?